I didn’t know Joey Kareta, so I feel a bit sheepish saying this one’s for him.

Any of his friends or family could speak more eloquently and knowledgeably about him, and several of them did at the sentencing of the man who liquored up at a country club and took Kareta’s life while speeding to another bar.

Craig Barton was sentenced last week to a five- to seven-year term in state prison for killing Kareta with his car, a “2,000-pound bullet,” as Kareta’s parents called it.

Barton, a lawyer, was golfing and drinking – often at the same time – at the Orchards golf course in South Hadley prior to the crash, according to prosecutors. They told the judge who sentenced Barton that a waitress at one point had balked at bringing him another drink because he had a full glass of beer in front of him. “I want to get drunk,” Barton was reported to have told her.

His Lexus was going 61 in a 35-mph zone when it left Brainard Street and went up on the lawn where Joey Kareta was fetching his aunt’s mail. The impact knocked Kareta out of both shoes and one sock and threw him 80 feet through the air. Prosecutor Matthew Thomas seemed deliberately vague about Kareta’s injuries, perhaps because his family members were there in the courtroom, weeping.

Barton’s lawyer asked that his sentence be served in a county house of correction instead of in the tougher, state-prison system, calling prison “inappropriate” for Barton.

“Our current system doesn’t separate the wheat from the chaff,” defense attorney George Nassar said.

Barton, predictably, has taken a beating in the court of public opinion, which has deemed him the chaff. Much of the acrimony stems from the fact that he’s a lawyer; his friends insist he’s not a monster but a troubled guy.

But, this column is about Joe Kareta, not Craig Barton.

His given name, like his father’s, is Frederick. I don’t know why everyone called him Joey. Based on the statements of his friends and family, I only know that Kareta did a series of good deeds on the day he died and that these deeds were nothing out of the usual for him.

Kareta, 22, worked at the White Wing, a gas station and convenience store, and, although Saturday was his day off, he volunteered to take an extra shift when a co-worker couldn’t make it. At the end of the shift, he drove an elderly customer home and then stopped at his uncle’s house to mow the lawn. His last good deed was picking up the mail for his aunt, Karen Kareta, at her home in South Hadley.

Joe helped Aunt Karen with any number of chores and was, in the words of another aunt, “the light of her life.”

After Joey Kareta died, Karen Kareta stopped eating. She died some seven weeks later, of what some relatives believe was a broken heart.

On the night Joey Kareta died, his family had planned to go out to a restaurant to celebrate his graduation from Westfield State University with a criminal justice degree and his sister Kerry’s graduation from the College of the Holy Cross. Kerry Kareta was driving home from Boston when she got the call about Joey. She’d left him a voice mail earlier that day, but he never checked his messages.

Kerry Kareta is devastated by her brother’s death.

“My spirit and love for life has dwindled,” she told the judge.

Kerry had always wanted to be a dentist and was set to attend dental school. Now, she can’t seem to summon up the interest.

“I have no motivation,” she said in court. “My dream of becoming a dentist died the day Joey’s life was taken.”

Barton’s sentence was no consolation to the Kareta family. Regardless of his time behind bars, Joey Kareta will never be a police officer or firefighter as he dreamed. He’ll never have children to carry on the Kareta name.

His father, Fred Kareta, told the court he wanted to change places with his son when he saw him dead at the hospital. “At that very moment, I wanted to die myself,” he said.

But, the remaining Karetas go on living. I didn’t know Joey, but I feel it’s safe to say that would have given him some comfort. He would have wanted them all to go on and pursue their own dreams. He just seemed to have been that kind of guy.